Marorka: A Startup Profile

It is not fair to do a Startup Profile on Marorka as it is technically not a startup because the company has sailed the rough waters of the Valley of Death and it is well on the way of becoming one of the stars of the Icelandic startup story. The company was formed in 2002 so it has been a 10 year journey… However, there is a story behind the story, it took the company a while to break into the Shipping industry I am told. It is only in the last 3 years that the company has really taken off and I believe the reason is because of their focus on the software side of the data that they gather from the ships and opening access to that data through the internet. In their own words “Marorka offers onboard and onshore Fuel Management and Energy Management solutions equipped with real time monitoring and decision support, an essential part of operational optimization. With Marorka’s energy management solutions for voyage tracking, inventory recording, reporting and data analysis, your business will be well on its way to maximized efficiency.” I was rather surprised to hear that Ship builders do not provide the necessary information to optimize energy usage in the vehicles, it actually makes sense, no car manufacturer tells you how best to drive your car i.e when to step on the gas and when to step on the brakes. It is quite interesting that the founders of this company saw the opportunity and built a business. What was very interesting for me to understand was the sheer volume of time series data that they capture transport to a central server process it and make it available on a portal for the Fleet or Ship manager on shore to see. There are a number of challenges one has to factor, connectivity to the Internet is not continuous and the amount of data that can be transmitted is limited so I see algorithms that were used in the early days of the internet data transfer protocol should serve them well. I don’t know their software architecture but it should be an interesting problem to solve or improve on.